Friday, September 26, 2008

Here's something I learned today that I never knew before! ...Actually, when you think about it, everything you ever learn is something you never knew before. Otherwise, you'd already know it, so there'd be no learning involved... Where am I? ;)

Today's short-post is a little trick concerning Solaris 10 and the Veritas File System/Volume Manager. I've been using Veritas with Solaris 10 for quite a while, so this was pretty interesting to find out. In the usual case, I could always set up Solaris zones and hand them Veritas File System partitions with no incident. Usually, something like this:

host # zonecfg -z myNewZone...

<-- Here we skip past the create and "set zonepath" type stuff. We have more information on dealing with Solaris zones in this old postzonecfg:myNewZone> add fszonecfg:myNewZone:fs> set dir=/my/directoryzonecfg:myNewZone:fs> set special=/myNewZone/my/directoryzonecfg:myNewZone:fs> set type=lofszonecfg:myNewZone:fs> endzonecfg:myNewZone> commitzonecfg:myNewZone> exit

and life was beautiful ;)

Out of sheer luck (or horrible misfortune), I've always ended up at places that (while they may make heavy use of Veritas Volume Manager, File System, Cluster Server, etc) either went with some combination of SunCluster, Sun Solaris, HP and Oracle or Informix. Now, there's nothing wrong with any of the possible combinations you could end up with here. In fact, there's - more exactly - nothing wrong, since all of them (well, not HP-UX) can work with Solaris 10 zones using raw devices.

If you're not familiar with basic disk access concepts in Unix, at a very basic level, disk in Unix is generally accessible via two standard gateways: Block devices or Raw/Character devices. Most of the time, you probably deal with the block device interface, as this allows buffered sector reads of the device (generally a hard drive/disk) and is generally faster for most operations. To demonstrate what I mean, if you wanted to read a few bytes from HardDrive1, you could read those few bytes from your block device (almost to the byte) , but you'd have to read the entire device in order to get those few bytes when accessing the information via the raw device interface.

Raw devices do have their benefits, of course, or they probably wouldn't be around any more. Like their name suggests, they allow direct (raw) access to the disk. This can make it possible for you to recover information if your disk becomes corrupted (for instance) but is mostly used by software that likes to manage disk on its own and not have to rely on the Operating System. Most database software uses disk in this manner. Oracle, for instance, creates its own "file system" and (although it will work on UFS or any other filesystem) they say it works a lot more efficiently when it can be allocated raw disk and allowed to manage it on its own. It's probably true to some degree. Does anyone really know? ;)

Anyway (back from that two-paragraph aside ;), what I learned today is that Solaris 10 Zones can't (or won't) deal with raw Veritas devices (WT_?) I also found out that there's a way to get around that issue (hence, the post - I still owe you that one that goes on and on forever and leads nowhere ;).

and make note of the Major and Minor numbers of the device (289 and 45000 respectively, above). You'll need these to feed the mknod command you're going to hammer out next (we'll assume you set your zonepath equal to /myNewZone - oh, yeah, and it's also important that you're not in your "Zone" when you do this):

host # cd /myNewZone/devhost # mknod myRawDisk c 289 45000

2. And (it seems too simple!!! ;) then you just need to (well... you should ;) log into your zone and check it out, with a simple "dd" test or something: